The Presentations Japan Series

Whether we asking to give a talk or asked to present, we need an audience. The onus is on the meeting hosts to take care of the logistics of the venue and the associated tech needed to carry out the presentation. We cannot leave everything to them though, because our personal brand is tied up with the success of the event. Now "success" can be defined in many ways, but having a venue space for fifty people and having five people turn up, wouldn't strike too many people as a triumph. This would be more like an embarrassment. We naturally want to get our message out to as many people as possible and so we want to maximise the audience size.

There are a couple of hooks for us to pull an audience for our talk. A key one is the title of the talk. This can sometimes be a talk title which must be approved by the organisers or you may be free to choose the one you prefer. If we look at newspaper, magazine or any media advertising headlines, there is a real skill in getting these titles to grab people's attention. Most speakers are not trained copywriters. They never imagine they need to enlist the help of a copywriter to help with creating the presentation title. So we are all in the DIY school of speaker copywriting.

The best title selection will revolve around a number of factors, such as the content of the talk or the nature of the audience. Think of the title as a hook, to snag interest from potential attendees. What title would locate the sweet spot of both appealing to those interested in the topic and a compelling offer, to inspire the punters to turn up to the speech. The title cannot be too long, in the same way that headlines are kept brief. How can we get the explanation of the content and the hook, into as few words as possible.

Last week, I talked about how to use the Balloon Brainstorming Method to create your speech content. The construction of the talk I explained, starts with the punchline, crafted in as few words as possible, in order to drive clarity. I also went through how to create the base content sectors, which are the bones of the talk. Having done all of that, we then create the opening piece. This is there to smash through all the clutter in people's minds, when they enter the venue, to hear our talk. The title is often best taken from that opening piece. We don't use it word for word, but we look for the strongest hook therein, to finally create the talk title. We only have a few words available for that, so each word must really outperform for us.

I was recently asked to give a talk, but received no great guidance on the topic. The host wanted to pull an audience. So I thought about what is a common topic that would attract as many people as possible to attend. I chose "public speaking" because this freaks most people out fairly universally, across all cultures, ages and gender ranges.

I also have a lot of experience and am an expert on this topic, so I have supreme confidence to talk to an audience about it. This sounds like bragging, but we must have expertise and real confidence to stand up in front of others and pontificate. If you don't have that, then please spare the rest of us the train wreck masquerading as your talk.

I used my Balloon Brainstorming methodology for the content creation. Finally I had to create the talk title. I had come up with 15 subtopics, which would be too many for the time allowed to cover, so I needed to trim that down.

I decided to go with twelve topics, because it is a substantial number, but doable in the time granted to me. So, I started writing out possible titles, to see if I could find one that would resonate. In the end, I came up with a title using alliteration as a means of grabbing attention. The hook was The "Terrible Twelve" Typical Errors That Presenters Make And How To Fix Them. I was pushing the boundaries on title length, but I liked the alliteration of "The Terrible Twelve Typical" components in the title. Key words were Typical, Twelve, Terrible, Presenters and Fix. Anyone reading that title would have a clear idea of the value of the talk. If they had an issue with presenting, they would feel this would be a talk providing substantial value, through its clear coverage of the topic.

The next step was to flesh out, in a few sentences, the content of the talk giving the audience a taste of what will be covered. This will be the text to accompany the title, when the hosts advertise the talk. Again, we only have a few sentences to work with, because there are always space limitations when advertising the talk. We should have some word count indication from the event sponsors, of how much we can say, when we are writing this piece. This overviewhas to reek with value to the audience and should cover the key pain points associated with the topic.

Finally, we need a customised Bio to go with the talk. It also will have a limitation on length, so only the highlights associated with your being an expert on this subject can be covered. It is not a job application, so don't send in your modified CV. This has to be crafted by you as power text, not a shopping list of bullet points. We want to build our personal brand and establish our credentials to talk on this subject. Remember many more people will read about you, than will ever be able to attend the actual event. This is a free kick, advertising you to the world. So, what do you want people to know about what a legend you are?

A request came to me recently asking me to speak to an audience. So my first question was, "what would you like me to speak about?". The answer was fairly broad. Actually, that is good and bad. Good, because there is plenty of scope to tackle various subjects, but bad because it is rather vague and obtuse. Where to start? I absolutely won't be searching for previous slide decks on related subjects or thinking about the slides I could create on the subject. In this regard, I am in the minority of presenters. This is the minority you want to be in, because that slide first crowd is categorically not the group you want any part of.

When we are tasked to give a talk, how to do we work out what to speak about? A technique I always use when brainstorming about anything is the idea balloon brainstorming method. I will have a problem I need to solve. I need a system that generates the best possible ideas I can come up with and at hyper speed. Maybe someone else has better ideas, but they usually aren't around when I need them, so I have to work it out by myself.

The first step is to use paper and pen. This is old school I know, but there is something about the creative process for me that works best on paper. I am also a visually oriented learner, so being able to "see" the ideas on paper works well for me too. This is me and you may be different. My point is to know what does work for you in the first place and try and master that system, rather than just fumbling around in the dark.

I write the key word or phrase in the middle of the sheet and draw a circle around it, an idea balloon type of look. Then I think about what are the related elements to this subject. This is at a high level in this first instance. Say I was going to give a talk on presenting. The center of the balloon would be the word "presenting". Each element related to this topic would be written and then a circle drawn around it, creating idea balloons, with connecting lines drawn back to the center balloon. Elements might include "topic selection", "preparation", "delivery", "audience analysis", "common mistakes".

Each of these elements would then be transferred to individual separate sheets of paper and each word goes in the center of its page and the process repeated. The order is important. For example, I need to understand who I am talking to before I plan anything. So I start with "audience analysis", then drill down to the elements related to that which might include new sub-balloons such as, "gender split", "expertise level", "age demographic", "industry", "language fluency" etc. These would be points I would ask the organisers about, before I even started the speech preparation. I need to know at what level to pitch my talk – are they experts or amateurs or a mixture. This selection would normally be enough information and I wouldn't need to drill down any further.

For other elements, I would want to go deeper though. For example, "topic selection", would be the next logical step. I would place that in the centre of a new page and then start adding the sub-elements. This would include topics such as "topicality", "data availability", "my angle", "my expertise", "audience value factor", "audience interest". Taking each sub-element, I can go deeper again. On a fresh sheet of paper, I could place "topicality" in the middle and start building up ideas circling them into balloons on the page. For example, "Covid-19 health concerns", "business disruption", "working from home", "isolation", "staff retention issues", "mental health", "suicide increases", "leadership issues", "productivity", "cash flow", etc. As you see the list can grow very quickly for some sub-elements.

The beauty of this system is the combination of breadth of the topic possibilities and depth achieved with each topic, all being done again at a rapid clip. In ten minutes, you have multiple sheets of paper with a lot of ideas created from which to start making some selections. The next stage is tougher however, as you have to start making decisions on what you will select from the numerous possibilities. The talk has a time limit, so there has to be a sieving of the gold nuggets, that will have the greatest impact on the audience and provide the highest value. Remember, these are our personal and professional reputations we are putting on the line every time we present.

Once the topic is decided, I need to write a single sentence or phrase, which encapsulates what I believe about this topic. This is the punchline and should be completed in as few words as possible. I am forced to be clear. This is usually quite difficult, but the effort put in will help to make the conclusion we craft well worth it. The next step is gathering evidence to support the conclusion. There will be sub-chapters inside the talk, to arrange the evidence into a flow, that is easy for the audience to navigate. We need to remember that every five minutes we must switch up the presentation content, to keep our audience in our grip.

The last thing we design is the start of the presentation. This is where we build that all important first impression with the audience. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism this opening has some heavy lifting to do. We have to establish our credibility to deal with the sceptics and smash through all the clutter clogging up the brains of our assembled audience. It has to be powerful or the masses will be scrambling for their phones to escape from us.

Outlining our presentation is where we start. The assembly of the slides we will use comes last. It is important to get the order right. Do so and you will always come across as a polished professional when you speak.

This recent debate is a hot button topic. Let me set the record straight, I am an Australian living in Tokyo, so I have no dog in this American presidential brawl. I am approaching this topic from the point of view of what we would do, if we were under attack in public, rather than to rule on the rights and wrongs of politicians' strategies. Imagine it was you up on that stage getting hammered, what would you do? As a presenter, it is unlikely you will ever face a Trump when you are speaking to a business audience. A political debate is a different animal to the cultured world of business, as we urbane professionals give presentations on worthy commercial subjects. Nevertheless, we can come under attack when presenting and there will be no moderator there to try and rein in the provocateur. Biden and the moderator Wallace were clearly rattled by the constant interjections and disdain for the pre-agreed debate rulebook. In public presentations in business, there is no rulebook.

Heckling speakers has been around forever. The political world especially, has this from top to bottom. Watch the British parliament in action and there is the moderator, the Speaker, struggling to get the interjecting honourable members to shut up. In business, the heckling most often occurs at town hall meetings of the staff and shareholder gatherings. The employees or the shareholders have a beef with management and they are unrestrained about arguing with what is being said. They don't have the floor when heckling, so they are limited to a few words or a short phrase. This was much the same as Trump's tactics during the debate. They major in the short sharp barb that is very hard to parry.

If we are under fire when speaking, what should we do with these interjections, usually voiced with venom? This exchange has to be understood for what it is. This is not an intellectual engagement where the full issue can be argued at length and in depth. This is a vicious Iron Mike Tyson left hook to the jaw, aimed to disable, humiliate and provoke into error. In any audience, there will be a cross section of people listening to the verbal fisticuffs.

One group will not approve the tactics, because it is outside public decorum boundaries, but will sit there in silence not wishing to get involved. A smaller group enjoys blood sports and they have discovered that public speaking is a new category for them to enjoy, so they like the spectacle. There is another minority group in hot agreement with the heckler and will feel emboldened to get involved directly themselves or to just utter shouts of agreement with the heckler. This aggressive group will not be converted to agreement in a public forum by you, because your differences are often ideological, financial or procedural and can't be breached very easily.

Actually, we don't need to try and win the debate, because we can never win them over. What we have to do is preserve our dignity and appeal to the basic fairness of the silent majority. When people yell out during our talk, we have a few arrows at the ready in our quiver. We can invite them to debate with us at a different time and place, as we need to go deeper on the subject, well beyond the time constraints of this event's schedule. We can ask them to agree to disagree. This is disarming because we are saying we don't see any resolution of opinion here, so let's accept that fact and move on. We can appeal to fair play and say we should be allowed to make our point and mention there will time at the end for questions, so ask them to please hold the interventions for the moment and let's have the debate at the end of the proceedings.

When we feel our antagonist is trying to slam verbal shivs into us, we can hit back hard. We have to do this in a way though that doesn't end up in a verbal brawl that diminishes everyone, like we witnessed with the presidential debate. We can say, "That sir (or madam) I believe is an outrageous untruth. Having said that, I respect your right to hold a different opinion to mine, so let's take this debate off line and you and I can argue the case at the end, after the event is formally concluded. I look forward to it. For the moment, let's continue with proceedings". This approach dismisses the heckler's point as untrue, but in a way which seems balanced and fair. Of course, the heckler and their entourage won't be satisfied with that approach, but we are not trying to win them over. We are aiming to appear elegant, in control, considered and above the rough affray.

If they continue heckling, we just say, "Thank you. I accept your right to disagree with me and I have already stated that I am happy to debate with you at the end, so let's leave it until then". After which you just pick up where you left off and continue with your talk. If the heckling still continues, it now moves outside the bounds of acceptability and their argument and they themselves are both diminished. Either the silent majority will become less silent and tell the hecklers to be quiet and leave it until the end or the organisers will be forced to take action to shut down the mob. You don't care, because the key objective is to emerge from this verbal punch up looking in control and professional. Name calling, arguing the point, counter heckling, telling people to shut up etc., means you are now in the blood and the mud wrestling with them. Once they drag you down to their level, you cannot get back up again. Your own credibility is compromised. Avoid this at all costs.

You see it. The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A. They can't engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time. It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive. Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation.

Rehearsing the presentation takes time. Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides. This is why failures fail. They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient. It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don't have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time. That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end.

I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney. No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn't go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again.

Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience. Always make the time to go early. I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop. Their Microsoft environment didn't like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing. I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start. I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck. If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now.

First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio. People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them. Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters. Do your best to be charming. Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me. Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room.

Don't eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk. Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport. You can always eat later if you are starving. When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage. Have zero interaction with the laptop – don't even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening. You don't need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression. Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling. By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine. Don't be one of them.

Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience. We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations. Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there.

Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time. Read their faces. Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement? This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up. In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping. It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber. Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod. I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here. I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again.

Keep the main body to around three major points in a thirty minute talk. Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of "fake news". Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience. Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters.

Don't get into arguments in the Q&A. There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed. Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, "let's continue this discussion after the talk. Who has the next question" and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk.

Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience. The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about. Don't let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close. Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses. Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.

It was a strange feeling. I was back in the Super Safe Classroom after 7 months of teaching solely LIVE On Line. In the online world, we are engaging our audience every two minutes. Remember, this is the Age of Distraction. Audiences are weaponised at home with unseen devices to escape from our grasp and our message. They will be multi-tasking like demons on speed, given the slightest pretext. We have to be very, very focused on keeping them engaged. Teaching live in the room, I had to suppress the urge to say "give me a green check", or "give me a smiley face" to keep them active and onboard with me.

It led me to think about how much engagement I was getting previously with an audience. Occasionally, I might ask them to raise their hand in response to a question. This is a bit of a tricky thing. You can very quickly wear out your welcome with this type of request. There is that creeping feeling of being manipulated by the speaker. We are in the eye of the storm right now between the pre-Covid and post-Covid era, as presenters. This whole schmozzle will probably take at least a year or more to clean up, once vaccines become widely available. What will be some of the differences around giving presentations, when we get back to some semblance of normality?

In the good old days, I would be looking for some head nodding to let me know if the audience were engaged or not. Is that going to cut it anymore? Our body positioning can be very dynamic. I was at a talk in my hometown of Brisbane, where the presenter took this to another level. The speaker was introduced by the MC, "Ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming our speaker today, Mr. Brown". There was no Mr. Brown. The stage was completely bereft of presenters.

Suddenly he started. We could all hear his voice, but he was nowhere to be found. It was quite startling. We all sat there perplexed, craning our necks around left and right frantically searching for the origin of the voice we could hear. He then very slowly and deliberately walked up the middle aisle from the very rear of the hall, to the stage speaking all the while. It was a spectacular entrance, I have to say and quite bold to do it that way. I haven't had the guts to try that yet, but maybe now I will give it a go.

As I previously mentioned, we would teach students not to overdo the hand raising bit, but what about from now on? Will live audiences be more comfortable with getting more involved in the talk? Let me make an important clarification here. I am not talking about those diabolically dreadful dross webinars, where the speakers are captured in tiny boxes on screen, like an assortment of cheap omiyage chocolates in a tacky box. These are very sad and boring affairs, with all the talking heads just droning on and on.

I am talking about LIVE On Line, where there is tremendous interactivity. "I am unmuting you Tanaka san, so please come on camera and share with us your thoughts" or "Let's go to Suzuki san for some comments on this issue. Suzuki san come off mute and tell us your ideas please". "Give me a green check please, if this has been your experience too?".

Will we be calling on people for their comments on some issue? We always have a chance to get there early and meet a few of the punters as they arrive. We remember their names or maybe we made a note on their meishi. We take the opportunity to have a conversation on the topic before proceedings get underway. We could say, "Tanaka san, earlier we were speaking about this very issue. You had a very interesting take on it and would you mind sharing it with everyone. Can we get a mic for Tanaka san please?".

Will we be walking into our audience more? Using our body language to get up close and personal. Jesper Koll is a well known speaker here in Tokyo and must the most entertaining economist in captivity. He will suddenly lurch forward to where you are sitting, in the first or second row, tower over you and hammer you with a rhetorical question. The problem is you have no idea if this a question you have to answer or whether he will answer it himself. Trust me, when he swings your way with that question, you break into a sweat because usually these are questions for which you have no good answer. He has your full attention.

The LIVE On Line rule is you must have interaction every two minutes. For the in-person talk that would be too much, I think. However, as audiences have been trained to accept more interaction with the speaker, maybe we have to lift our game and get them more involved than we did in the past. Let's try it when we next get an opportunity to present in a real, rather than a virtual room.

Speaking is easy, so being clear should be easy too. Well that sounds good in theory, but there is more hope in play here, than actual technique going on. Imagining that your usual conversation style is sufficient for presentations is another exercise in hopeful thinking. Wait a minute, people say that we should speak in a conversational style, so isn't this confusing or contradictory? What is meant by "conversational" is that the feeling should be relaxed, familiar and inclusive rather than aloof, stiff and hierarchical. Being clear when speaking to audiences is no accident. Careful planning is needed and so is a pair of pruning shears to trim the excess from your discourse.

We have a common tendency in casual speech, to spend a lot of time saying something which can be communicated much more economically. Often, we begin by making a reasonably clear statement and we are doing well in the speaking clearly stakes. Then we spoil it, by adding a lot more content to the same point. In one of our speaking exercises called the Magic Formula, the action step the speaker is recommending and the benefit of that action, both have to be communicated in five seconds each. How hard can that be, you might be thinking?

In our training classes, I hear the participant punch out the key point clearly and in time, but then they just keep adding and pilling on the words. They begin to waffle. This is a habit we need to kill, when making more formal presentations. Today's audience of thrusting multi taskers have no patience with dross. In fact, they have no patience period. They lurch for their mobile phones and seek refuge in the internet, to escape that white noise in the background. That white noise is you by the way, taking too long to get to the point.

Being clear revolves around having a crystal central message, which has been constantly worked on until you can write in on a grain of rice. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point is to get it down to as few words as possible. This requires massive effort to get clarity of the message you want to convey. Once you have sieved the nuggets of your speech, then you start looking for the framework to hang the speech on. You need a structure that arranges the point being conveyed wrapped, bound tightly by evidence. A great example of evidence is to tell the background as a story, involving events, people, places, seasons and times. Evidence can also be statistics, examples, data – anything that will satisfy the logical types in your audience, who only believe in facts.

This main body of the speech is where the key arguments are made and it has to be tight, tight, tight. We arrange the argument, point then evidence, point then evidence, all through the main points. We do so while employing brutal brevity. Get out those razor sharp pruning shears. If the content isn't strongly supporting your key points with muscular evidence, then tighten it up or cut it out. Getting each key point down in size, gives you greater scope to add more salient points. Usually, in a thirty minute talk, you will get through around three to four main points. Three main sections of the speech packed to the gunnels with waffle and fat with fluff, destroys your credibility. Instead compare that to five major points supporting the argument, all lean like a racing greyhound. We should be keen to glean the dynamite points from all the material available and make room for as many of those power points as we can manage.

The flow between the points should be silky smooth, with the end sentence of one setting up the start of the next section of the points and proof you are putting forward. We need a bridge between the sections rather than lurching abruptly from one point to a different point. Doing it this way will be baffling our audience. Often this is what happens though. The speaker wanders all over the place, frothing up three or four main arguments and leaving a trail of confused punters in their wake. Waffling on is the mantra of the graduates of the Hopeful School of Public Speaking. We don't want hope, we are going for clarity and surety.

Speaking speed is a tricky balance. We don't want to kill our audience by bludgeoning them with a monotone, lifeless delivery. We want to speak with a lot of energy and naturally we tend to speed up in the process. The more passionate and engaged we become, often the faster we go. We need to maintain the passion, but adjust the torrent flow. More pauses, shorter sentences and a good cadence are best. If you notice you are speeding up, then stop speaking and create a small pause, so that you can regroup and continue at a better pace. Concentrate your passion and energy on key words which you want to emphasise. Doing this will mean they stand out in the mind of the audience. All words are not equal. We choose which ones to give more power to, making them stronger.

Speaking powerfully, clearly and with passion is a brilliant combination. This is the result of planning not hope. The other key success ingredient is to practice. Getting the cadence right only comes through practice. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech wasn't the first time he had delivered it. He had given it many times refining it and practicing it, until he had a sufficiently large enough stage to make it a beacon for racial equality.

I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year. I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further. What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don't have that chance to present publically so often. I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model. They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak. Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself.

1. Stand up straight.

Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip? How hard could that be? Surprisingly many people can't stand up straight. They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual. Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor. This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed. Stand straight and don't' sway about.

1. Turn your neck

Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides. Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker. Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person. You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing. Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience.

1. Start strong

It is very hard to build up the energy after you start. For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later. When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there. Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already. We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message. A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention.

1. Use gestures intelligently

The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying. A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, "this is a huge global project" and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don't match. For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body.

What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept. Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc. When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated. However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal.

1. Eyeball your audience

If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them. The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact. Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong. They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one. This is fake eye contact.

We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact. We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk. Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive. Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there. That is powerful.

1. Use your voice

Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly. Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words. It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak. Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety.

1. Turn the energy switch on

We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation. We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting. We need to really ramp up the energy output.

We have a different role when we are in the limelight. We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying. An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience. We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation.

If you start adopting these seven tips into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective. Are any of these tips especially hard? Not at all. What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better.

A bonus tip is to rehearse. Don't experiment or practice on your audience. Don't spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission. Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review. You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.

Waffle. This is the enemy of speakers and presenters. Ums and Ahs are obvious fillers. We all recognise them when we hear them and we know we have to do a better job to eliminate them. The more insidious waffle sneaks into our talks wholly uninvited and assassin like. The impact on the audience is immediate. They are lunging for phones to escape from you to a better place. Waffle camouflages our key message. It hides it like those fleshy vines you see in documentaries, which have engulfed and overwhelmed an ancient city, deep in the jungle. Yet we are oblivious to it.

We teach the Magic Formula for persuasion success. It requires the discipline to get your key action recommendation and the benefit flowing from that, down to five seconds each. Five seconds is a pretty unambiguous number, with zero wiggle room. Yet in the role play practice sessions we hear fifteen and twenty seconds action calls. Why is that? The direction was get the key point you want us to act on down to five seconds. Waffle is the human tendency. We are draw like suicidal moths to the flame of unnecessary elaboration.

Why do we limit the action and benefit statements down to just five seconds? Why not make them ten or fifteen seconds? The five second goals is a force of nature, that pushes you to become more succinct and much clearer. We are all babblers and just keep talking and talking. Usually, long after anyone continued listening and beyond making any intelligible crucial point. You have to winnow your words, to filter out the non-essential, to drive to the heart of the matter.

This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so that people are now jointly poised to stop listening to you and to stop believing what you say. It is getting harder and harder to hold an audience's attention, so we must get to the point quickly and in a way which is credible. Does that mean we should start with our action and benefit from the get go? It is a really great idea if you love to debate with your listeners and you enjoy the cut and thrust of fencing with critics.

The modern brain is deadly. Combined with our Darwinian education system of promoting winners and vanquishing losers, audiences have become demonic. As soon as you unfurl your conclusion, you will now be facing an army of arm chair confounders, discombobulaters and critics. They become totally deaf to the many and good reasons backing up your recommendation and their brains are on fire with the million reasons why this is a lousy idea. They may be rivals within the firm, flaky colleagues, bosses, picky clients or just smarty pants types who love to demonstrate how much smarter they are than everyone else in the room.

The genius part of the Magic Formula is that you don't have to serve your own head up on a platter, to the raucous, uncouth and great unwashed mass of disparagers. Before you tell them your recommendation, you spice things up with context, background, evidence, testimonials and experience. I can disagree with your conclusions drawn from the context, but I cannot easily disagree with the context itself. This is very handy, because it forces everyone to get the background, before they run off half-cocked dissing your idea. The key is not to waffle on and on in the context explanation.

The background needs to be tight, to the point, rich in evidence and perspective. If not, those business school types who confuse written communication with oral offerings, will go after you saying "get to the point". True, an executive summary comes at the start of the written document. Just don't re-produce this B-school model in your presentations. That is a guarantee of disaster.

Give them the background first, tight, taut, and terrific. Then tell them what they should do next and why it is good for them. This disarms critics. When you are telling the context, these overactive thrusters will be racing ahead to their own conclusion from the evidence. This is when you ambush them with your call to action. Most likely it will be the exact same conclusion they came to, based on the same context, background and evidence. What a sweet feeling to take the wind out of the sails of enemies, wannabes, nasty bosses and picky buyers.

Trapped in a small screen in the corner of the monitor has become everyone's reality when we have group meetings. I have been holding training sessions online now since March, as well as participating in numerous public webinars. There are some things that clearly don't work, but here we are about to go into fall and no one seems to be making any significant changes, to up their online game. It is not for a lack of insights. I have been writing about these issues for months, as I am sure have others, so obviously the messages are not getting through.

The monitor screen saps our energy levels, as they appear to others. We might think we are showing lots of energy, but the reality is, it is less than we imagine. In a recent training session, 19 people had to give their presentations one after another. The contrast was striking. Those who were more highly energised were more credible and appealing than those who looked lethargic and tired on screen. The attendees of the training were all highly engaged and they were giving their presentation of their own creation, so the buy in factor to the exercise was 100%. They were not tired, but they appeared that way, because they were not maximising the use of their energy for the small screen.

When we are presenting, we want the audience to buy what we are recommending or suggesting. Even if it is just an "inform" style of presentation, we still want the viewers to believe in the value of what we are proffering. Reactions to presentations are heavily biased in favour of those who seem to believe what they are saying, as opposed to those who seem to be just going through the motions.

The impression we receive, to a great extent, is determined by the amount of energy the speaker is putting behind the words they are saying. We hear that the speaking volume is high without it being too high. The audio systems the major online platforms use, do not handle shouting terribly well, so we have to up the volume, without it going over the top. Hitting key words in sentences, bringing our energy to them, really accentuates the messaging and is a very effective use of our voice.

One of the speakers was terrific at adding in facial expressions to increase the power of her messages. Combined with a strong, confident voice, she was a winner. Most of the other speakers were holding a neutral expression on their face, regardless of the words they were saying. In these cases it is diabolically easy, for the audience to escape.

Dr. Albert Mehrabian's oft quoted research mentioned that if you are incongruent when speaking, ninety three percent of the time, you don't get your message across. What he meant by incongruent was that the words and the way we are saying the words, have to match up. If it is a happy event, then we look happy. If it is a serious affair, we look serious. Having no facial expression at all, means there is no energy coming out of the muscles of our face to support our key messages.

Gestures are tricky on the small screen, particularly if you are using a green screen background, to deny the viewing audience the inner workings and secrets of your household. Gestures are powerful though and they can really light up a presentation. If you are revealing the shambles of how you live to the audience and have no green screen effect, then you are free to use gestures of any variety, as long as you keep them in shot, based on your distance from the camera lens. It is a good idea to practice gestures on camera, to see where the limits are.

If you are using green screen backgrounds, then any gestures going wide will suddenly see half your arm disappear, like a magic trick. Try to keep your hands in front of you and move them toward the camera. There is less chance of them getting chopped off that way. The scale of the gestures in this case, are a bit more contained, but you can still bring additional power to your words with gestures.

There is no doubt, that adding energy to our presentations on screen is important. Also, whatever you think is enough energy output, add another 20%, to actually come across as you imagine you are doing.

We have all grown up in business watching internal presentations at our firms. It might be a big announcement, a town hall, a shareholder's meeting or just a weekly meeting. Then we have those cases where we go outside the company and present to clients, industry groups, Chambers of Commerce etc. The sad thing is that rarely are any of these presenters any good. How can that be? None of the things I have mentioned are new items. These types of presentations have been given, in one form or another, since we had things called companies. The people giving them are not stupid. They are invariably well educated, well experienced and talented. Not too many companies want useless, stupid people speaking in front of others or representing the brand. So why don't we see scintillating and sizzling business presentations as the norm?

There are cultural norms. In my experience, America seems to have an education system and society, where speaking up is encouraged and blowing your own horn is not an issue. As an Australian, that is an issue. We have a thing there called the "tall poppy syndrome", which means that any poppy flower that tries to get above everyone else, gets cut down to size. Japan, interestingly, has the exact same concept with the "derukugi" (出る釘は打たれる) idea, where the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Every other country falls somewhere on this scale of self-aggrandizement with America and Japan, probably being the bookends.

When you make a presentation you are thrusting yourself forward. This can be a booster for your career or a career limiting disaster, or something in between. The interesting thing is very few people are able to make it a career booster. Part of it can be self-limiting beliefs about your ability to actually stand up in front of others, without quivering like jelly, from head to toe. Another part of it can be possessing no concept of the importance of the act of presenting and its solid link to career building. Companies promote people who are articulate, clear and persuasive, because they know these are the requirements for leaders. Many specialists imagine their technical ability will carry the day and they can get a free pass on being capable as a presenter. That is possibly true but only up to a point. If you can't be persuasive, your technical abilities are not a substitute when firms are considering who to promote into leadership roles.

So we could expect that people who are motivated to push forward in their careers and get to the top echelons of the company, would all be rushing out to get trained on how to be a professional when presenting. Rarely the case in fact. Well why is that? Part of it can be the concept of "good" is the enemy of "great". They are smart enough to do a good job and have concluded that is enough. Or they may still be clinging to the belief that being a great lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect, accountant, dentist, etc., is the first and only order of priority, as far as building a successful career goes.

When the people around you are equally talented and knowledgeable about their profession, how do you stand out? There was a little known Senator from Illinois who projected himself to national attention at the Democratic Convention, eventually becoming America's 44th President and the first African American to do so. Barack Obama did that by giving a great presentation at that Convention, in a political world packed to the gunwales with thrusters, self-promoters and self-aggrandizers.

Business is fiercely competitive, be it winning the client or winning the promotion. Changing our mindset about presenting and facing the reality of being able to present well, in order to advance through the ranks, is a necessary starting point. Next we need great training to stand out amongst the crowd. Even though most business presentations you have ever seen have been boring, you don't have to join the ranks of those dud presenters. With the right mindset and training, you can quickly advance to the top 1% in your field as a presenter.

Look around you and quickly realise, it is not crowded at the top. Idea application is all, so take action and get properly trained.